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‘Tis the season, it seems, for high-minded new media launches. Last week Arianna Huffington unveiled her new website, The World Post, in front of a group of well-fed plutocrats in Davos; this week it’s the turn of Ezra Klein to announce that he’s going to build a new news site under the Vox Media umbrella, and for Pierre Omidyar to release a video outlining his own journalistic ambitions.

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No crisis can last forever, and the main lesson I’m taking from the 2014 World Economic Forum is that, at least as far as the world’s elite are concerned, we’ve finally put the financial crisis behind us. There are still a lot of things to worry about, of course, both political and economic. But this was by far the least economically interesting Economic Forum I’ve been to.

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For an organization which loves to talk about the importance of social responsibility and civil society, it’s notable that the WEF has never had a panel on LGBT rights. This year, however, the issue has finally become impossible to avoid. Russia is in the midst of a poisonous campaign against its LGBT citizens; once the Winter Olympics are over, that crackdown is only going to get worse. And in Nigeria, where homosexuality has always been illegal and dangerous, president Goodluck Jonathan — who is here in Davos — recently signed into law a brutal new piece of legislation which makes even supporting gay rights punishable by ten years in prison; a round of arrests under the new law has already begun.

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I’m at DLD, in Munich, where on Monday I moderated an enjoyable discussion with Georg Petschnigg, the co-founder of FiftyThree, and David Karp, the founder of Tumblr. FiftyThree is the company which makes Paper, Apple’s iPad App of the Year in 2012, and also Pencil, the beautifully-weighted stylus which makes Paper even more of a pleasure to use. Tumblr is deeply embedded into Paper; it’s more or less the default way in which people using Paper share their creations.

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Back in 2012, I wrote a post with the headline “How Larry Gagosian is like Goldman Sachs”. The general idea was that both of them use their relationships and their balance sheet to make money off and/or with their clients. Since then, as Christian Viveros-Fauné says, the art world has become even more coterminous with the art market:

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“Despite the confluence of promising signs,” write Peter Eavis and Jessica Silver-Greenberg today, “little in the vast system that provides Americans with mortgages has returned to normal since the 2008 financial crisis, leaving a large swath of people virtually shut out of the market.”

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I have an essay in the January issue of Wired about the limits of quantification. In the magazine it’s headlined “Why Quants Don’t Know Everything”, but online it’s been retitled “Why the Nate Silvers of the World Don’t Know Everything” — which is a little unfortunate, since the whole essay is deeply indebted to Silver’s book, which makes substantially the same point.